Five Works to See at Sharjah Biennial 16

The 16th Sharjah Biennial, titled ‘To Carry’, unfolds across the Emirate of Sharjah from 6 February to 15 June, 2025. Spanning 17 venues – including Al Mureijah Square, Kalba Ice Factory and the Buhais Geology Park – it showcases over 650 works by 200 artists, with more than 80 new commissions. Curated by an all-female team – Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep Öz – the biennial invites reflection on themes of migration, memory and resilience.

Stephanie Comilang, Search for Life II (2025)

In a biennial often preoccupied with the past, Search for Life II (2025) by Stephanie Comilang feels refreshingly contemporary. The two-channel video splices footage of pearl divers and open-air markets with TikTok videos of farmers and influencers selling these precious gems online. Comilang has a knack for distilling the complex histories and present-day realities of global trade and migration into works that – amidst a broader trend for didactic essay films – are surprisingly entertaining in their freewheeling approach to genre. The installation’s sculptural elements share this playful spirit: one film is projected onto a ‘screen’ made up of thousands of pearls, viewable from a multi-level wooden pier. There are iPhone clips, too, of the artist’s own hands adorned with elaborate pearl-studded nail art – a look she was also sporting during the biennial’s preview. These, along with the TikTok videos, point to how new technologies have transformed a declining historic industry into a thriving global market.



Aziz Hazara, I Love Bagram (2025)

Aziz Hazara’s I Love Bagram (2025) may be less visually spectacular than some of the other sculptural offerings in Sharjah, but it rewards patient viewing. Comprising a group of flatscreen televisions placed on large metal trunks and shipping crates, the installation – as well as the photographic series ‘MoonSighting’ and ‘Skin Care’ (both 2024) – reflect the Berlin-based, Afghanistan-born artist’s ongoing activities in Bagram Airfield. Built by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and subsequently an important hub for US and allied forces during the War in Afghanistan (2001–21), the military airbase was covertly evacuated in July 2021. Since then, Hazara has been documenting the rubbish left behind by soldiers and – as he told me during the biennial opening – covertly sending it back to the US as his ‘present’ to the American people. Righteous anger underpins the whole project, but there is also a dark humour in the artist’s insistence that the US government take ownership of the mess – both literal and metaphorical – that they left behind in Afghanistan.

Megan Cope, Kinyingarra Poles (2024)

It’s an hour drive from Sharjah Art Foundation to Buhais Geological Park, but it’s worth enduring one of the Emirate’s most infamous traffic jams to see Megan Cope’s Kinyingarra Poles (2024). Comprising more than 150 timber poles wrapped in garlands of oyster shells, this site-specific installation blends seamlessly into the spectacular landscape of the park, which sits on a former seabed surrounded by the rocky mountain range of Jebel Buhais. The piece references the importance of oyster harvesting for the indigenous Quandamooka people – who live around Mulgumpin / Moreton Bay in Australia – and builds on the research behind Kinyingarra Guwinyanba (2022–ongoing), a living, generative intertidal sculpture Cope installed in Quandamooka Country in an attempt to heal an ecosystem disseminated by colonial-era overfarming. By installing a new version of this work in the once-fertile, now-arid Buhais Park, Cope speaks to ‘deep time’ – the many billions of years of geological history that preceded us.

Sakiya, Capital Coup (2024)

In the old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, Palestinian collective Sakiya has installed ‘Um al Einein’ (Mother of the Eye), an exhibition within the larger biennial that references the group’s activities in an occupied West Bank village. At the centre of the installation is Capital Coup (2024), which reimagines the US Capitol building as a humble henhouse. The press materials for the work cite Sakiya’s philosophy of ‘ephemeral infrastructure’, which ‘integrates destruction into construction and celebrates maintenance as a form of care’. A little more than four years on from the US Capitol attack of 6 January 2021, the improvised nature of this wood and steel mesh structure clearly evokes the fragility of our institutions and the erosion of the US’s moral authority on the global stage in the wake of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Luke Willis Thompson, Whakamoemoeā (2024)

Set in 2040, Whakamoemoeā is a fictional state broadcast announcing that Aotearoa / New Zealand has successfully transitioned from a liberal democracy to an Indigenous plurinational state. Described by artist Luke Willis Thompson as a piece of ‘political science fiction’, the film draws on real recommendations made in the 2016 Matike Mai Aotearoa report, which was produced in response to the lack of meaningful input the Māori had been allowed to make to the country’s constitutional processes. It’s a compelling watch, thanks in no small part to broadcaster Oriini Kaipara’s commanding performance. Playing a representative of the newly formed congress, Kaipara – who, in real life, was the first person with a traditional moko kauae (chin tattoo) to read the news on a national network – embodies the Māori absolute sovereignty that this new model of governance seeks to achieve. ‘This is a Māori Country, and we never surrendered our status here,’ she declares, her eyes wide in a fierce pūkana. ‘The right to self-determination is inalienable!’

‘Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry’ is on view at various locations in Sharjah until 15 June.

_{Main image: Stephanie Comilang, Search for Life II (detail), 2025, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation and TBA21, Madrid; Photograph: Danko Stjepanovic}